


Meat

by Eccentric_Exposition



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Horror, Post-Apocalypse, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:21:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25041592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eccentric_Exposition/pseuds/Eccentric_Exposition
Summary: The world is meat. The city is alive. The mutant vat-born and the all powerful noble gerontocracy alike find everything changed, when a monster is created with something they have never seen before: A face.
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vethyrae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vethyrae/gifts).



_Desherik was a home. His daughters, spawned off of his broad shoulders, grew and grew high into the city. Then his daughters had daughters, larger still. He died, gasping for breath, crushed beneath the weight of generations, scratching desperately for answers._  


* * *

  


The ribs of the warehouse quaked. A muscular diaphragm that passed as its ceiling shivered in its death throes. The only light came from a hot, equatorial sun, still low in the dawn, invading through a wet puncture high on the wall. The buzzing of a patcher, all compound eyes and proboscis, filled the air. Its dumb instincts had it spit up concrete and metallic gel around the wide wound, emptying its stomachs in an attempt to seal it, before taking off into flight once more.  
  
Inside, only one vat still lived. Its flesh rippled and distended, bulging with amniotic fluid and new life. Its progeny was very nearly ready. Yet it was almost too late.  
  
A plug burst. Waters sluiced out, sloshing over the filthy, chitin shelled floor, foaming at the edges as it picked up dust and turbulence. Lips split apart and out fell a body, all tangled limbs and confusion. Her three arms clutched at her own naked form and her mouth opened wide to splutter and cry.  
  
Her cry turned from surprise to panic, as the agony of the waking mind took her senses. Long legs were clumsy and the arms didn’t seem to be wired up correctly. She couldn’t stand. It was hard to peel back the lids that covered her sensitive eyes. The light made her body protest. It was too much, too soon and it hurt.  
  
“Bee,” a dry, rasping voice called out. Called out in language, something that she recognised, somehow. “Come here. Come to me. Please.”  
  
She did not know how long she had laid there, wailing. The hot air had begun to dry her, leaving her smooth skin and plates sticky, hair congealed over her eyes and lips.  
  
“Bee, please. Please listen. You have to come to me.”  
  
Bee managed to tame a limb, reaching up to wipe slick hair back, over her shoulder where it was out of the way. With open eyes, she managed to calm her breaths, looking around her dying place of birth for the first time. There, in a dark corner, amidst rotting machinery, was a fallen figure. No, it was the rotting machinery.  
  
“Yes. Come here, my sweet. You can do it. Come here.”  
  
She tried. Three arms. Three legs. No, that wasn’t right. But there were hands and feet. Bee couldn’t support her own weight yet so she dragged herself. Her plates slid over the cool chitin of the floor. At first, the spilled waters made it easy. But as she made it metre after metre across the ground, it became dirty and harsh and abrasive, scratching at her skin where it was exposed.  
  
“Good. Good. Yes. You’re doing so well. Come here Bee.”  
  
In the dark, Bee could finally make out the source of the voice. It was a fallen woman, her mother, stitched into a network of arterial hoses and slick nervous wires that trailed out, linking her into the dying building itself. An almost skeletal hand reached out, trembling. Bee was close enough now that her mother could run a hand over her cheek.  
  
“I don’t understand,” Bee slurred, somehow finding words, her tongue clumsy, her throat tight.  
  
Mother hushed her, taking Bee’s body in her arms and pulling her close.  
  
“Save your voice,” Mother rasped. Her body felt so cool to the touch. It made Bee shiver in spite of herself. “I need you to do something. Can you hear me?”  
  
Bee swallowed a lump in her throat, retracting her lolling tongue back into her mouth and nodding.  
  
“Good. Oh, look at you. You’re so small. So almost…” Tenderly, Bee felt herself being pat down, checked over. It was reassuring in a way. She looked around and they were quite definitely alone. The walls shuddered again.  
  
“Bee, my sweet. I need you to get up. You have to get water.” With a gentle hand, the dying mother turned Bee’s head, meeting the child’s confused eyes with her own empty sockets. The giver of life took a hoarse breath before she continued, voice working its way from between lipless teeth and a silvered jaw. “I need you to be strong and do exactly what I say. Can you do that for me Bee?”  
  
The vat born child nodded again, this time with greater apprehension. Something was thudding in her belly, filling her with a giddy anxiety, but she had to try.


	2. Chapter 2

The entryway sphinctered open. With a hand, Ay parted a final curtain of skin, slithering inside with his legless, armoured body. Sharp, cool evening air mixed with the warm and humid miasma within. Looking around, Ay’s massive beaked head slowly turned. Fingering the rags that he wore about his chest, the belts and pouches that he kept close, the scavenger crossed the chamber. It was at a large, whittled bone table that he stopped.

“What have you brought for me?” Croaked a voice from above.

Ay didn’t look up to see from where on the ceiling the voice had come from. With a crack, his beaks parted, splitting to expose two fat eyes and a smaller, fleshy head within. His top jaw folded over to his back. With no nose or mouth to speak of, what now passed as Ay’s head rolled, stretching his neck as it split open to take a deep breath.

Taking his time, the scavenger removed a single severed claw from a pocket in his rags. He thumbed its top, running skin over its print, before putting it down onto the table. Next he tossed down a fistful of tumour, raw biomass.

“The rest he stole is outside?”

Ay nodded from the shoulders as the ten-limbed grafter clambered down the wall, pincered legs bringing it to the table where it looked over the treasures that it was brought.

“Excellent. No-one takes from me, Scabber,” It boasted, then snickered to itself. Appraising the tumour closely, feathery antenna waving, it muttered, “No rot. Still fresh enough.”

The scavenger stood a little straighter, flexible lower body oscillating then coiling as he balanced upright on the shelled floor. He was easily the larger, the more powerful in form, yet he held no command here.

“Hmm? Oh. Yes. Of course.” Djey the Grafter stood a little taller as well, straightening its many knees. A dozen alien sensory organs opened and waved from the stump between its arms. “You’re sure about your payment? A voice?”

The scavenger nodded with no hesitation.

“It’ll be dangerous, hmm? You’ve had so many, many augmentations already. Don’t want you turning, hmm? Going feral.”

Ay let out a whistling sigh before removing a leathery skin from under his rags. He put the flask down on the table with a heavy thump. Even prizes had a price here.

“Gel? Yes. Well this will help won’t it?” The Grafter snickered again from its chest, snatching the package up with a pincer. It wouldn’t help - at least not with the risk of aug-madness. “Come on then. This way.”

Djey turned and teetered along on its sharp legs, scratching its way across the chamber and into an adjoining passage. The scavenger followed, sliding smoothly, propelled by the twisting of his snake-like form. He kept pace as best as he could, passing under electric lights - artefacts of another age, stapled across the ceiling and the walls. Ay followed Djey through the twists and turns of his sanctum, his altar of worship to the plastic and mutable, until they reached a final grim chamber

“Make yourself comfortable. I’ll see to the mess outside first.”

That wasn’t possible. The orange glow of the sodium lamps in the hall washed over the Grafter’s surgery table, with its ancient tools and metal machines, and cast sharp, alien angles in the darkness. Ay wasn’t one to give away an ounce of fear, not even with the taste of blood in the air, left alone in this den of horrors as his host crept off. He closed his beak tight, turned his body around on the floor for good balance and set about removing his clothes in defiance of everything that could go wrong.


	3. 3.

Bee had been told that, for as long as she could feel the heartbeat of the city under her bare feet, she was safe. The slow, slow thumping cadence reassured her as the sky grew dark, the blue space above with its white-hot spark fading through orange and red, violet to black.

Tattered scraps hung high above, draped between vast silver arches that reminded her of her mother’s teeth. Those leathery rags were a source of light now. Caught in the wind, they danced as they cast a dull sort of bioluminescence from nodules that patterned their torn surfaces.

She made her way back to the ditch, between starving buildings and towers that seemed to wilt further and further with each passing hour. Her progress was slow. She seemed to weigh too much for her slender legs to properly carry, ankles hurting when she stood still to catch her breath. The steel bowl that she clutched so close seemed a burden too much to bear, even empty as it was.

At the bank, Bee fell to her knees, gasping as her smooth palms and knees found the calloused ground. She let herself slide down, bowl tumbling with her, until she reached the tear that she had made at mother’s instruction. It was slowly oozing warm water, tapped from some damaged lymphatic gland near the surface. So thirsty, despite this being her third journey for water today, first she pressed her face to the wound and sucked from it. Swallowing her fill, the child sat back against the flesh of the city and let the wound drain into her bowl.

The air grew chill but the ground was warm enough to keep her comfortable. She repaid that by using a nail to pick at the slope, scratching at it until she could peel back more and more skin. She exposed a raw, pink surface and then kept going until it spilled more thick, red waters. Before long, Bee was pulling long ropes of skin and meat from the ground, bundling them up and throwing them aside.

Then fear filled the air. It was a dizzy, sharp pheromone scent. The child shot to her feet, scrambling faster than she ever had. Scanning the dark, she saw that she was not alone. A freak was crouching in the night, sneezing its chemical messengers in an attempt to communicate.

“I’m not a hound,” Bee said to the thing in the shadows. Swallowing back her lolling tongue again, she added, “I won’t hurt you.”

It beetled out of the dark, black hide shimmering in the blue hues cast down from above. Bee could see that it had no real mouth to speak of - at least nothing like hers - so she offered a hand to it. The freak was hesitant in its approach. Yet it took her hand and they allowed each other close. She guided its fingers to the sensitive backs of her knees, for its squat form found that the easiest to reach, whilst it brought her hands to its shoulders. Bee found herself tapping away, sharing a silent language of touch and scent that she knew but that she didn’t know how she knew.

“Who are you?” She asked without sound.

“I’m Heych,” It answered with a chitinous touch, tickling her skin with the thick hairs on its tarsus.

“I’m Bee,” she said, trying not to squirm. The freak seemed to be calming. At least it had stopped belching out its fear, as they shared voiceless words.

“You’re young. Were you just shed?” It asked, confused, as if that shouldn’t have been possible.

“No. Mother made me.”

“The… The Vat-Mother made you?” Its nervous twitch returned, a sour note hanging in the air.

“Yes,” Bee said. The freak seemed lost for words. Unable to stand the silence and the  _ silence, _ she asked, “Who made you? Where did you come from?”

“I was shed a long time ago. I lived here.”

“I’ve not seen anyone else here.”

“Everyone else is gone. They left when the city stopped crawling. Or they died. I thought the Vat-Mother had died.”

“I didn’t know the city could crawl,” Bee said. The freak seemed disappointed that mother might still live. It hurt but she tried not to let it show, looking away.

“It can’t, not anymore. Heych explained, its movements suddenly feverish, desperate. “You should leave too. I’m leaving soon. I need to get enough food and water first… Enough to make the crossing,”

“Where are you crossing to?”

“Another city. You look…” It began but didn’t finish, leaning to see her more clearly in the dark. Bee let it. She had done the same. It looked so different to her and mother.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s dark. You should hide. Will you be here tomorrow Bee?”

“Yes. I have to keep getting food and water.”

Heych released her, nodding its body. It quickly scuttled off.

“I’ll see you tomorrow then!” Bee called after it, unsure if it could hear her. She was alone in the dark again. Looking around, the child needed a moment to collect herself before she returned to the ditch. With unsteady legs and a weak grip she first gathered up the ropes of meat in her arms, the water that coated it congealing and darkening as it dried. Carefully, she then balanced the overflowing bowl on top of it, before clambering from the ditch and heading back, trying her best not to spill.

At the warehouse, the entranceway had fallen unresponsive. Even the trembling of the walls had stilled. Bee ducked inside through a crack, where the muscles of the building had begun to peel from a tall rib and its chitinous plates had cracked apart.

No sooner had she entered than the offspring started chirping. The little animals, some maggoty and some legged, had emerged from the vat only a short while after she had. They couldn’t speak. They couldn’t do much for themselves at all, as far as Bee could see. Mother had told her that if she had to eat them no-one would blame her. It was okay. It was how things could be, sometimes. But never had mother told her to do it and she hadn’t. How could someone devour their little sisters? They crawled and lopped up to her. Bee cooed them a little hello, before stepping over them, crossing the room to mother.

Mother hadn’t eaten a thing. She had carefully explained to Bee that she didn’t have the necessary organs for that, not anymore, but Bee had managed to get her to sup a little water. They had worked together for many hours with metal tools, mother instructing and Bee doing as she was told. It was an amputation, piece by piece, separating the woman from the wall.

Now Bee looked over her gasping parent, laying there against a pile of steel machinery and dead vat, having only made it metres from where she had once been intertwined with the dead structure. Yet they had bought her a little time.

“Are you okay, my sweet?”

Bee nodded. She awkwardly stepped over, careful not to get any of her dozen or so siblings underfoot. With one arm, she dropped the meat, to which the others squealed in delight and began to nibble and chew, crawling over each other to get just a bit of biomass for themselves. To her mother she offered the bowl of water.

“No. No, that’s for you Bee,” mother gasped. Her breathing had gotten worse. Her head hung back, neck limp.

“You have to have something,” Bee argued, eyes flooding, but she knew whatever was happening to this place was taking her mother with it. Putting down the bowl, it too was left to her little sisters, who greedily sucked and splashed at the gift, nearly tipping it over and spilling its contents in their dumb hunger.

“I need you to take care of yourself. Do it for me,” the Vat-Mother said.

“I will.” A heartbeat rippled up from beneath - then another and another, before Bee asked, “What do I do now?”

“Come here.”

She did, curling into her mother's embrace again.

“Everything’s dying. It’s not fair,” Bee cried, tears stinging her eyes.

“I know. I need you to remember how important you are. Never let anyone hurt you, Bee. You’ll need to leave this place. I won’t be able to go with you.”

“Please!” Bee begged, choking on the pain inside her chest, all of her arms clinging  desperately to the cold body of her mother.

“I’m sorry. Let’s rest, just for a little while. We can talk about what you have to do  in the morning.” 


	4. 4.

“Is he awake?”

“He is. Mostly. I always keep things a bit, hmm, contained. Just in case.”

Ay parted his beak. The world around him was cast askew. His head was full of clouds and delirium. Something hurt, somewhere, but he hadn’t realised where it was yet.

“Hunter,” said the tall thing, two great stilted legs and a fluted maw. “I hope you are comfortable.”

Everything was a little off. Ay wasn’t sure he trusted it. He tried to lift a shoulder but he could not. No, he was cocooned. Of course he was. The grafter always encased his customers, Ay remembered, through his disorientation. He had been here again and again as he chased his augs, embedded into a tomb of hardened wax and secreted resin.

“He seems confused,” whistled the tall one.

“He’s had a soup. The new brain matter won’t be helping, either, I’d imagine. All those new organs needed a helping hand. Hmhmhm…”

“I need him awake.”

“... I am,” Ay croaked, feeling his head flap around between his beaks, vision shifting as he spoke for the first time.

“Get him out of… That. No time to rest.”

It was a powerful thing, to be reborn. Most never got to experience it. However, Ay had been through this many times before and he had developed his own quiet form of dignity. He didn’t scream when the resin was cracked, and the outer shells were torn away one by one. He didn’t fall when the support was taken from him and his body touched the beating flesh of the city once more.

“What were you hoping would come of this?” Asked the tall one. Ay had been led out, through the labyrinthian gullets of the grafter’s halls and onto the surface - a surface, the roof. They stood on a raised polyp, bloating over the sprawl of Acetyn’s forward cavity, the metropolis inside of the crawling city. The vast balloon space was supported by spinal column towers and bladders of cement, picked out by gentle bioluminescence that cast haunting silhouettes and the occasional short lived electric flash.

Ay had followed, because it wasn’t every day that The Voice of the Immortal, a herald with too much Name, came down from the ennobled paradise to speak to freaks like him. What an opportunity. What a threat.

“Wasn’t. It’s a luxury.” The scavenger slurped, getting used to his new mouth within a mouth, lips parting, throat working.

“That must hurt.”

“Not so bad.”

“The Grafters work miracles, you know,” the herald whistled, stepping around on his long, spindly legs from which his head hung down. “Djey and the other creatures like it.”

Ay intoned his agreement, beak opening to survey the oily city with his own eyes, before sucking back saliva and giving the herald a nod.

“You are still you then.”

“Can still work,” Ay emphasised, trying out his new voice a little further, with a growl. “Well?”

“The Immortal demands service.”

“Which is?”

“Out in the margins, there’s been a vat-birth. It is property of Her Greatness.”

Ay nodded, wiping a wet trail from his beak before leaning back on his tail to indicate he was interested.

“It is in Sestchek, the trailing city.”

“Sestchek’s dead, I heard.” After a moment, conquering his sore throat, Ay asked, “Killed?”

“Dying, perhaps. Fallen behind, certainly. That’s why we need someone of your particular skill sets to go out and recover the thing.”

The scavenger grunted his affirmation, hiding disappointment at how little The Herald revealed. However, not even service to those with divine provenance came without a price. “And for me?”

“The same as last time, of course. You will be taken care of.”

Ay gave a languishing shrug.

“No?”

“Voice luxury. Last aug. Going out with style.” The scavenger cackled, before tapping the side of his beaked visage.

“That is probably wise,” said the Voice. “You should swallow your pride, Ay, and accept a wage. Coin. You can buy whatever you might want, from Her servants.”

Ay nodded again, looking aside. Power cables pierced the roof, strung up towards steel rails. He followed the line with his eyes as it stretched off into the distance, out into the screaming maze of the urban bioscape.

“Of course,” the tall one whistled, capturing Ay’s attention again, “We should not be held ransom by the limitations of the mind.”

“I’m not.”

“You are scared of succumbing to aug madness. It is perfectly understandable.”

The serpentine hunter squared up, eyeing the frail beast with threat.

“You do not have to be afraid,” The Voice said, countering Ay’s hostility by affecting nonchalance. “There are ways - usually reserved for the ennobled - to remake yourself entirely. You could choose to think of it as a clean slate, an opportunity for a fresh start with an entirely new form.”

“That your offer?”

“I am sure we could work something out.”

“Why does she… Want the vat-born?” Ay asked, posture softening, rubbing another trail of saliva away with his forearm.

“It has something that the Immortal has been trying to single out from the genetic discord for a very long time: A face, like the old ones used to possess.”

“So I bring it back.”

“Or just the head, whichever you must.”

Ay bent his body and pushed himself along, slithering over the bulging surface of the grafter’s den. At its edge, he looked down over the pulsing city and its throng of twisted, mutant inhabitants as they went about their circadian lives.

“I’ll think about it,” he said. “Let you know tomorrow.”

Of course, Ay wouldn’t have a choice in it. The Voice, irritated by Ay’s little rebellion, turned and strode away, back down towards the depths of the tumorous building. On the way, he called, “We all choose to serve. Better, I think, than the alternative.”

Ay set his beak, grim, and stared down into the pits. He let a moment pass, listening to the herald walk away, before he turned back and shouted a question.

“How do you know it’s out there?”

A whistling laugh danced from the dark of the passage.

“It told us.”


	5. 5.

The reinforced metal door stood defiant against the flesh of the dying city. Insignificant against the size of the fortification, Bee found herself sitting in the middle of the road as she tried to translate the many enigmatic designs and eldritch devices that littered its surface. It had been nearly an entire day’s travel across the great slug already. Despite this, she had been instructed not to rush this process. Told what to expect, she had come with rationed water flasked away, at least enough for a few more days. Nevertheless, the beating sun made the soft skin on her hands and face, where it wasn’t silvered, pink and raw. She raised an arm, shielding her head from the glare with armoured plates.

There it was - lost in the dizzying, straight lines of yellow and black. That looked like what she had been told about. Bee pushed herself up onto her two rear legs. They seemed to be the strongest, least prone to hurt.

The child had to reach up, on the very tips of her toes, to get a good hold on the handle of the box. With a gasp and a pull, it snapped aside, hinged like a jaw. Inside, metal was woven together in an unnatural mesh. A flashing red light distracted her wide eyes for longer than it should have. Then she found the button she had been told about, and thumbed it down as hard as she could until it clicked.

The box hissed at her.

“I’m here to see the Wire-Witch!” She shouted back, louder, determined not to let it think it could get away with biting her hand off. She needed all of her hands.

Suddenly the ground shook – thumping harder than any heartbeat Bee had ever felt. The steel of the gateway screamed in pain. Bee took a quick step back, making way as it tore open. Strings of meat grown between the metal surfaces stripped apart, bleeding profusely from the trauma of the opening. She looked into the armoured cave. First there was darkness. Then it was filled with an unnatural, orange glow - one that at first reminded her of the setting sun. However, this light ticked and flickered in a way that disoriented her. Cold air rolled out to meet her. It caught in her throat and stung her nose.

Bee had to descend into the madness. It was why she came so far.

Feeling her stomach twist into nervous knots, Bee put one foot before the other and crept inside. She saw a host here to meet her - a dozen freaks standing at attention, staring at her. Yet they didn’t move, not even as she came closer. It was only then that she realised their impossibly symmetrical forms had no meat. Their silverline flesh was lifeless. Once she crossed the threshold, the gateway groaned once more and ponderously resealed itself.

The walls buzzed and hissed, then called to Bee in her mother’s voice.

“Come in. I won’t bite.”

“Okay. I mean… I know.”

The walls didn’t answer back. Bee stepped further into the chamber, then the next and the next. She was guided by sealed and opened doorways, only presented with one path. This place was made up of sharp, angled rooms and unnatural, narrow corridors. There were no pulsing gullets connecting cavities. There were no great organs growing into the spaces. The walls and the ceilings were ribless and stripped of skin. The cold of the air seemed to have infected the nature of the place. This place was sterilised of life, nauseating Bee with how removed it was from the city.

After dizzying sharp turns, just when Bee lost hope of being able to find her way back, she stepped into a quiet chamber. Opposite, the entire wall was made of panels, alight with ever changing, scrolling, transforming alien symbols. The array, with its bright lights and countless electric colours, snatched her eyes away. It took her some time to even see her mother sitting in a chair, at a table, in the centre of the room. 

Bee froze in the door. No. It wasn’t quite her mother, here. The eyeless skull, with its mirrored teeth and distinct jaw, looked the same yet her flesh was plump. She lacked the skeletal silhouette that her mother possessed, from ridding herself of internal organs. What hooked this woman into this place of plastic and metal was not fleshy and grown, but instead consisted of colourful wires and hardened, cabled mechanical apparatus. The table she sat at looked old; There was no bone here. It was something else, dark and stained but still soft at the edges - still organic.

“What’s your name, dear?”

“Bee,” she answered, swallowing a lump in her throat. Suddenly conscious of her hanging tongue, she retracted it.

“That’s a nice name.”

“Are you the Wire-Witch?”

“I am. Come sit down, Bee.”

Bee tried. She had never used a chair before, and it was so much larger for the child than for the witch. Dragging it back, Bee scuffed the wood of the chair against the wood of the floor before hopping onto it. The Wire-Witch watched her with vested interest, back straight, posture perfect, whilst Bee leaned forward with her hands and elbows on the table. It was so strange for Bee to see that lipless, eyeless visage on someone else.

It was only after the bizarre ritual and the ordeal of sitting down was completed that Bee asked, “Can you help me with something?”

“That depends on what it is, Bee,” the Wire-Witch answered. Amusement played in her voice. Bee felt out of her depth.

“I need to send a message to the Bone Monks in the Crawling City.”

“That’s very specific. Did your mother tell you to do that?”

The vat-born gave an unsure nod, before throwing aside her doubt. She looked at the Wire-Witch in her empty eye sockets and answered. “I have something to tell them.”

“How is Eye?” The Wire-Witch asked, quickly changing the subject. When Bee didn’t seem to understand, the master of ancient technologies elaborated. “That’s your mother’s name.”

“She’ll be dead by the time I go back,” Bee answered quietly but firmly.

The frankness of the answer made the Wire-Witch pause. She tipped her head and said, “Yes. Yes, I imagine she will be. She gave herself to this city.”

After their gazes met again, Bee couldn’t help but ask, “Why do you look like her?”

“We are sisters. Or she is my mother. It depends how you look at it. My name is Djay. Do you know what a sister is?”

Bee nodded to that. “Yes,” she said. “I have sisters.”

“Do you?” Djay laughed. “Do they look like you?”

The child shook her head, quietly mesmerised by the sight of her mother’s skull, laughing.

“No? I didn’t think so.”

The two of them, strangers yet family, sat across from each other and shared a moment of silence. The air was filled with the soft hum of fans from the bank of screens. Bee wanted to say so much, to eek out some familial bond that she couldn’t articulate. She eventually managed to speak, after squirming in her seat.

“I’ll give you whatever you want.”

The skull that the Wire-Witch wore turned down. She looked over the smooth surface of the table, before dragging a hand over it and tapping her long, titanium nails in a steady rhythm.

“No, you won’t,” the witch said. “And you should never make that promise to anyone.”

Bee felt her throat tighten. Her hands shook. Despite everything she knew, it felt like her own mother chastising her

“Do you understand, Bee?” It was just like her.

“I… Yes.” The child managed to turn her eyes back up to meet the Wire-Witch, even though it made her cheeks burn and her stomach flip.

“You shouldn’t trust anyone who doesn’t earn it. Not even family has your best intentions at heart.”

“I know you’re dangerous.”

Djay laughed again. She shook her head, leaning back from the table. Her chair creaked. “I’m dangerous? Eye told you that did she?”

Bee nodded. The Wire-Witch bore down on her.

“Do you even know what they called her, out there? The Vat-Mother! The Mother of Monsters!” The Wire-Witch stood as far as she could, the cables that anchored her body to the wall stretching taught, hands slamming down as she became enraged. “She ravaged our body and made it into a little breeding factory, whoring herself out to Them, making Them twisted new bodies to their exacting specifications. She made living weapons too, enslaved children created for killing on demand! Anything for biomass and a bit of Their attention!”

The Wire-Witch was shouting now, incensed it seemed that a child had come into her domain and insulted her. Flinching with every word, Bee kept her head down. She knew what most of it meant, but it took a moment for her soul to fully digest it and to fight back the tears of panic. The child didn’t want to hear that about her mother. Bee shook her head, as if that would make it all go away. 

Neither could meet the other’s gaze. Bee’s chest hurt and she struggled to breath. Managing to look up to the Wire-Witch, she was met with a fleeting glance, before the older woman averted her gaze.

“A sample of your blood,” Djay finally said, much more quietly. There was resignation in her voice. “That is the price. It will be nothing you’ll miss and you’ll never get so kind an offer again.”

Bee could only nod and accept that was how things were going to be.


	6. 6.

The Crawling City’s forward cavity was a hard, calcium shelled thing. Between spinal columns and barnacle vaults, byways and courts were inhabited by living, sapient monsters. Only the light of bioluminescence and the yellow, sodium glow of electric lamps revealed the deepest recesses, a tomb of civilisation buried deep within a titan. Its heartbeat was slow. Every thousand pumps there was an unmistakable resonance. The bell tolled from its heart as predictably as the sun rose over the outer horizon and metal fell from the stars, both scorching the earth.

The hunter looked out over the rippled, cement street. Stilted thralls took lopping steps over the uneven ground, heading heart-ward by the dozen. They shrieked to clear the way, a decree of His Eminence, Lord of Bone.

Nence sprayed chemical words, dragging Ay from his lost thoughts. He grumbled and once more their hands met, sharing silent communication.

“A fresh start for one newborn?” Nence asked.

Ay patted his confirmation, reaching into his satchel and putting down a tumour for his companion. Taking hands again, Ay explained, “I need a ride, supplies, anything that can take me to Sestchek.”

Nence took the biomass and weighed it in hand. They both looked around the near-empty watering hole. No-one else who squat in the darkness met their eyes.

“Help me one more time,” Ay croaked with real words. The scintillating feathers on the back of Nence’s neck and arms stood on end. He clutched the tumour to his chest and spat back an affirmative scent. Distracted, Ay turned his beak to the outside again. Freaks of all shapes and sizes dragged themselves past, in the wake of the mad Lord’s thralls, a slave army on their way to the tumour mines.

Outside, across the roadway, one of the cartilaginous pipes opened. It wretched from its place on the side of a building and vomited up a whorl of bile and phlegm. Then out fell a freak, shed into the streets. Alive only moments, passing thralls bound it in manacles and shrieked for their slaves, who began beating and dragging the monster, conscripting it on the spot.

Nence reached out, cooing softly from his throat to once again steal back Ay’s attention. Nence didn’t have words himself, not ones that came from a voice. “Don’t lose yourself for this,” he said with his hands. “I don’t trust the shapers and the sculptors. They only mutilate.”

Ay took Nence’s hand again but he used his voice, even though it still stung. “I know. But I can… Get us out of here.”

His eyes turned down between his beaks before he continued.

“I can make everything better.”

Nence creased his oily, feathered brows and leaned in closer. He was concerned, putting a hand to the side of Ay’s beak, trying to give the hunter at least a moment of comfort.

“You don’t have to do anything else,” he said. “You already do so much.”

“The Voice offered me a wage.”

“Coin?” Nence asked, unsure.

“Yes. I almost said yes,” Ay said, shoulders slumping.

“Some people give their lives to serve the Immortal,” Nence offered with slow, reassuring hand movements. “Real money could take us a long way, let us live up there...”

The Hunter shook his head and brought his side of the conversation back to silence.

“No. I won’t do it. It’s like giving up. We can work for what we want. Everyone needs biomass.”

“Alright. One last time,” Nence said, putting one of his six hands onto the Hunter’s shoulder. “A fresh start for one newborn.”


End file.
